Slideshare receives funding from Venrock! Big thanks to the community... you've made this possible!

May 8, 2008

First of all, a HUGE thanks to the SlideShare community for making this day happen. It would have been impossible without the millions of users who visit SlideShare every day. As a tribute, we have put together a small collage (below) of just SOME of our most active users... though I can think of thousands & thousands of other users who we would have loved to include in the visual.

Now to the news! SlideShare has secured a Series A investment to the tune of 3 million USD from Venrock, one of the prominent venture capital companies in Silicon Valley. With this investment, David Siminoff, managing partner at Venrock has joined SlideShare's board of directors. This rounding of funding includes smaller angel investments from some prominent technology stalwarts- Broadcast.com founder Mark Cuban, Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, David McClure (of 500 Hats), Saul Klein (founding partner of The Accelerator Group & ex Skype VP), Hal Varian (Chief Economist at Google), Yee Lee (ex Slide.com), Ariel Poler (former Chairman of Stumble Upon).

This funding will help us grow Slideshare better and stronger- bigger & faster servers, more engineers & employees to manage the website, bizdev folks etc.

And what better way to announce this than Meet Henry, the intensely popular & hugely infectious presentation genre that has inspired some many of our users (big thank to Ethos3 for creating this). Press releases are just so boring... they put you to sleep... why not let the lovable Henry (actually Dave, in this case) spice up the announcement just a little bit!